Ironhorse
by pollywantsa
Summary: Every action has a consequence. TV-verse.
1. Part One

**IRONHORSE**

* * *

**Part One**

'Were we expecting turbulence?' Alan looked up from _Thunderbird Two's_ navigation console as the aircraft juddered disconcertingly around him.

Virgil glanced at the MET display as the unexpected vibration quieted, then returned his gaze to the clear blue sky outside the cockpit.

'Localised instability,' he responded distractedly, squinting at the green jewel of Tracy Island as she rose through the haze of the South Pacific horizon. 'Disabling autopilot.' Virgil inclined his head towards his youngest brother, perched at the console beside him. 'Get Gordon back on deck and buckle up.'

'FAB,' Alan replied as he opened a ship-wide channel. 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is your co-pilot speaking. The captain requests all passengers return to their seats and fasten seat-belts for landing.' Alan grinned at nothing in particular as he removed his headset, stretched his neck and relocated to the passenger seat attached to the rear cabin bulkhead.

'Base from _Thunderbird Two_.' Virgil angled International Rescue's giant transport for descent, banking to bring her into alignment with the runway. 'We are on approach.'

'_Thunderbird Two_ from Base,' Tin-Tin's voice burst crisp and clean from the communications panel. 'You are clear for landing and your washing has been done. Cash payments only, please.'

'FAB.' Now it was Virgil's turn to grin, and he definitely had something worth grinning about. Fresh sheets on his bed, for a start. A soft pillow. And at least ten hours of uninterrupted slumber. The grin widened.

'What's keeping Gordon?' Alan's unexpected question wiped the anticipatory smile from Virgil's face. He glanced back at the empty space on the passenger seat, then raised an eyebrow at his brother.

'He didn't respond?' Virgil turned back to the intercom, irritation underscoring the edges of his words. 'Gordon. Location**.**'

Silence crackled from the cockpit speaker.

'Respond please.' Virgil stared at the island as it loomed larger on the horizon. Protocol demanded all crew secure on deck prior to landing. If Gordon didn't show up…_dammit_. 'See if you can get him on your wristcom, Al.'

'Gordon? Are you reading?' Alan's voice cut sharply across the whine of the engines. 'No response, Virgil. I can't even get a fix on him.'

'What?' Virgil didn't know whether to be worried or pissed. 'Go find him. You've got sixty seconds and then I'm aborting.'

Alan unbuckled himself obediently. 'Don't worry,' he tossed his hat onto the seat as he headed for the access passage. 'He's down there somewhere.'

'Fifty-five seconds, Al.'

Alan rolled his eyes. Virgil's moods could turn on a dime, and it was never worth poking the beast when he was in a state of flux. Alan slapped his hand against the corridor lighting panel, blinking as the lights flickered into life. A glance at the elevator showed it wasn't active, which meant Gordon was either still in the pod or making his way up via the access hatch. Alan leaned over shaft, hoping to see the dark outline of his brother already filling the narrow hatchway. Instead, the ladder was empty, all the way to the bottom.

'Gordon!' Alan bellowed down the shaft.

_Shit_.

If he had to go down there, then this was going to take way more than fifty-five seconds.

'_Gordon_!' He cocked his head, listened intently for Gordon's returning voice. Nothing.

Alan felt the faint prickling of unease beneath his skin. He placed a hand on the guardrail and peered intently down the empty shaft, Virgil's timeline ticking away unforgivingly in the back of his head. _Thirty seconds._

'Gordon!' He lifted a foot, placed it uncertainly on the upper rung. _Twenty-five_.

Perspiration bloomed in the palms of Alan's hands, his breathing suddenly loud in his ears. _Twenty seconds_. He tested his weight on the ladder, the metal warm beneath his fingers.

'Virgil?' Alan called back towards the cockpit. 'Something's not right.' _Seventeen_.

A tremor ran through the aircraft, shuddered its way through the superstructure and into the railing beneath Alan's hands.

'Virgil?' Alan clamped his hands tight to the guard rail, felt the aircraft lurch as she angled wildly off course.

_Fifteen._

'_Virgil!_' The railing slipped from Alan's fingers as he became momentarily weightless, the deck falling out from beneath his feet as _Thunderbird Two_ dropped abruptly out of the sky.

Time slowed.

_Fourteen._

Stretched like a ribbon…

…_thirteen…_

…and snapped.

* * *

'_Thunderbird Two_ from Base. What the devil's going on?'

Jeff Tracy stared aghast at the radar, hardly believing what he was seeing. _Thunderbird Two_ had dropped almost 1200 metres in altitude before levelling out, and was now overshooting the island.

'_Thunderbird Two_ from Base,' Jeff broadcast again, every glass surface in the villa rattling as the aircraft thundered just metres overhead. He looked at Tin-Tin worriedly. 'Shut that alarm off, would you?'

'Yes, Mr Tracy.' Tin-Tin disabled the proximity alarm, then turned to the window as _Thunderbird Two_ banked over the nearby headland and headed back out to sea.

Jeff switched channels. '_Thunderbird Five_. John, are you seeing this?'

'Yes Father, I'm seeing it.' John's voice snapped immediately into the room. 'I'm also reading only one life sign aboard. Biomet reads Alan.'

Jeff paled. 'Tin-Tin. Locate Scott and get him down to the operations room. Fast. You and Brains wait for me on the runway.'

He turned to watch the diminishing green speck in the sky as _Thunderbird Two_ banked one-eighty over the ocean and aimed herself once more for the island.

'_Thunderbird Two_ from Base. Respond please!'

* * *

Alan fought for control of _Thunderbird Two's_ steering yoke as he struggled to raise her nose skyward, tried desperately to gain altitude as the pressure wave from the aircraft's passage tore the tops of the island's palm trees to shreds below him. The frantic hails of his father spilled unanswered through the cockpit speaker.

'Virgil!' Alan screamed through gritted teeth, tearing his eyes away from the flight display to search the deck for his brother. _Where the fuck had he gone?_ He grunted as he felt _Thunderbird Two_ respond and pulled harder on the yoke, banking steeply to take the aircraft beyond the rocky shores of Tracy Island and out to sea.

The comms crackled again. _'Thunderbird Two_ from…'

'Dad!'

'Alan, what's happened?'

'I… Dad.' Alan's palms pressed hard against the steering yoke. 'Dad. Virgil's gone.'

There was a brief moment of silence, a millisecond of empty air as Jeff Tracy ran through a hundred possibilities in his head and rejected every single one of them. '_Thunderbird Two_, say again.'

'Virgil's gone.' Alan teetered on the edge of hysteria. 'He's _gone_!'

Static bloomed cold in the cockpit. An unbroken stretch of hiss and pop that needled into Alan's skin and settled deep into his bones. Sweat slicked cool beneath his fingers as he brought _Thunderbird Two_ around and aligned her once more with the runway.

'Dad?' Alan took a hand slowly from the yoke to buckle himself in. 'Are you reading me?'

The response was slow in coming, the single word hanging heavy in the air. 'Affirmative.' There was another burst of static. 'Bring her in, son. Just… bring her in.'

* * *

Scott adjusted his headset and scooted his chair towards the operations console as he logged on to _Thunderbird Two's_ primary flight display. He had come straight from locking down _Thunderbird One_, tired, thirsty, and stinking of day-old sweat.

'You heard?' Jeff strode intently into the room.

Scott nodded at his father and covered his headset mic with one hand. 'What the hell did Alan mean? Virgil can't have just disappeared.'

'You heard the same thing I did.' Jeff leaned towards the console to assess _Thunderbird Two's_ flight data. 'Bring up the cabin readings.'

Scott's fingers flew over the keyboard. 'Everything reads normal.'

Jeff scrubbed at his face. 'None of this makes any sense.' He straightened and turned to the viewport and the endless expanse of sea and sky beyond. _Thunderbird Two_ was barely visible in the glare, a tiny green speck aimed straight for the runway. 'Bring him down, Scott.'

'Yessir.'

'And patch John in.'

'Already patched.' Scott readjusted his headset. 'John?'

'Eyes open.' John's voice issued through the console speaker. 'Still registering only one lifesign.'

Scott's eyes rose to meet his father's, a thousand unspoken questions passing between them.

'_Thunderbird Two_ from Operations,' Scott opened the cockpit channel. 'Alan. You're clear for approach. You ready to bring her in?'

'Affirmative.'

Scott was relieved to hear that a semblance of calm had returned to Alan's voice. 'Switching to autonav.'

'I don't need autonav, Scott. I can see the runway.'

'I know kid, but I'm not taking any chances. Anything happens and I'm ready to remote in. You just give the word.'

'FAB.' Alan didn't sound confident. 'Commencing descent.'

Jeff watched the display as _Thunderbird Two_ commenced her approach, placed a hand on Scott's shoulder. 'You got this?'

Scott nodded.

'Then I'm going down to the runway.'

* * *

Jeff waited as _Thunderbird Two_ rolled to a halt at the end of the tarmac, superheated air washing down from the engine mountings and evaporating the perspiration on his face. His feet shifted on the burning bitumen as sweat collected slick and warm in the small of his back.

'Tin-Tin.' Jeff turned away from the backwash as the engines droned their way towards silence. 'Check the externals for breaches. Identify anything anomalous and report.'

Tin-Tin tilted her face towards the sky, shielded her eyes with one hand as she looked up at the cockpit. 'Yes, Mr Tracy.'

'Brains, follow me.' Jeff keyed open the forward entry port, sweat cooling on his skin as a draft of cold air washed out from the dark space beyond. He pressed a hand against the lighting panel inside the door, waited half a second for the lights to flicker to full illumination. 'Check the pod,' he instructed the young man behind him. 'Gordon has to be there somewhere.'

Brains nodded and stepped into the cool passageway, footsteps echoing sharply from the metal beneath his feet. He parted his lips and inhaled the still air, tasted ozone on his tongue. _Thunderbird Two_ seemed unnaturally quiet. And strangely dangerous.

* * *

'Textbook, Al.' Scott appraised _Thunderbird Two's_ remote flight display as Alan powered the aircraft down. 'Although engine one's running hot.'

'Don't care, Scott. I'm just glad to be on the ground.'

'I hear you.' Scott moved his headset mic closer to his mouth. 'Al?'

Silence burned through the connection.

Scott fingered the microphone and lifted his eyes to the window. 'What happened out there?'

There were sounds of movement. Rustling. A sharp inhalation of breath. And finally, 'I don't know.' Alan's voice sounded hollow, sent a knot of fear spiralling into the pit of Scott's stomach. '_I don't know_.'

* * *

Jeff paused before the cockpit door and activated the access panel, teeth clamping hard together as the door slid smoothly aside. The knot in his gut tightened as he saw his youngest son standing apprehensively beside the pilot's chair, a small figure stranded in a cockpit that suddenly seemed way too large. And way too empty.

'Dad, I…' The words caught in Alan's throat, pinioned there by fear and the inexplicable.

'Easy, son.' Jeff strode across the deck and placed a hand on Alan's shoulder, looked carefully into the wide blue eyes. 'What happened?'

'Virgil just… he just… _disappeared_.' Alan's shoulder tensed beneath his father's fingers.

'Alright.' Jeff nodded. 'We'll find him. And Gordon?'

'I don't know.' Alan shrugged away from his father's grasp and turned to the empty pilot's seat. 'Just before…' He paused mid-sentence, swallowed hard. 'Gordon wasn't answering his comms,' he said carefully as he stared at the red leather that padded the chair. 'Virgil sent me down to look for him.'

'And then what?' Jeff prompted.

'We hit a patch of turbulence.' Alan turned to his father. 'And then Virgil was gone.'

Jeff probed searchingly into his son's eyes. 'Report to Tin-Tin,' he said at last. 'Get down to the infirmary for a full work-up.'

'Dad.' Alan remained planted where he stood, the apprehension in his eyes giving way to anger. 'There's nothing wrong with me.'

'Alan.' Jeff's eyes continued to track worriedly across his son's face. 'A full work-up, he repeated. 'And as soon as you're done I want a written account of events. Every detail.'

Alan's eyes lowered, his jaw tight. 'Understood.' He paused by the passenger seat on the way out and bent to retrieve his hat. Alan straightened slowly, crushed the hat silently between his fingers. Jeff studied his son's movements, tried to find in the tightly clenched fists the answers to the questions that hovered unspoken in the air.

'Mr Tracy?'

Jeff flinched as _Thunderbird Two's_ internal comms burst unexpectedly into life.

'Gordon is not in the, ah, pod.' Brains' voice issue tinnily from the speaker. 'Internal sensors indicate no-one else is aboard. A-at least,' he faltered, 'there are no heat signatures registering outside the, ah, cockpit.'

Jeff wiped at the sweat that beaded across his upper lip. 'None of this is making any sense, Brains.'

'I-it's possible the sensors could be malfunctioning,' Brains ventured hesitantly.

_Unlikely_. Jeff's tongue caught on the word, unwilling to give voice to cold hard reality.

'M-Mr Tracy?'

'Download the flight specs and in-flight recordings for the entire mission. I want the CCTV for the flight deck, pod, every entry port and _Thunderbird Four's_ interior.'

'Yes, Mr Tracy.'

Jeff ran a hand through his hair as he surveyed the cockpit, eyebrows furrowing in consternation. He swept his eyes once more around the empty deck, placed a hand on the pilot's chair and pressed his fingers deep into the leather.


	2. Part Two

**Part Two**

* * *

'Mr Tracy? I know you can hear me.'

A cool hand slid beneath the collar of his uniform, fingers reaching firmly for the pulse in his throat.

'Can you respond?'

No, he couldn't respond. Didn't want to respond. Virgil was quite happy as he was, curled into a ball, tongue stuck hard to the roof of his mouth.

The hand removed itself from beneath his shirt. 'This sensation will wear off in a few hours, Mr Tracy.'

Virgil wasn't sure he wanted that. He quite liked the heaviness in his body, the lead weight of gravity pressing him to the floor, the thick sludge of blood pooling at the extremities of his limbs.

Footsteps passed close to his face and a voice sounded from somewhere high above. 'Confiscate everything.'

Virgil's boots were slid swiftly from his feet, his socks peeled neatly away from his ankles. Hands reached into his pockets, fumbled briefly with the buckle of his belt, his body pushed and pulled as his trousers were slipped cleanly away. His sash and shirt were pulled carefully over his head, his wristcom unsnapped and slid free of his arm. Virgil's bared skin prickled in the cool air, his flesh rising in slow and uncontrolled waves.

'Pick him up.'

Hands slid beneath his body, raised him to sitting, hoisted him into the air and balanced him on leaden legs. He was dragged, feet scraping over a cold floor, lowered again, limbs arranged neatly around him. Bile rose bitter in his throat as his head settled limp upon a flat surface. He felt breath across his face, a hand fluttering against his cheek, a thumb resting briefly in the cup of his eye. The fingers reached once more for his throat and paused, reassured by steady beat of his heart as it pulsed there. And then the hand was gone, and he was cold. And alone.

* * *

Alan tugged his uniform over his head and dropped it to the floor.

'T-shirt too,' Tin-Tin directed as she set up the diagnostic equipment.

Silently Alan peeled the shirt away from his body, stood goose-pimpling in the antiseptic air.

'Your father has asked for a full workup,' Tin-Tin continued as Alan stared at the floor. 'I'm sorry, but it may take a while.' She loaded a trolley and pushed it towards the diagnostic pallet. 'Hop on the bed so I can get you set up.'

Alan studied the pattern on the tiled floor.

'Alan?' She turned to look at him.

The blue eyes lifted slowly.

'On the bed, please.'

Alan looked at the bed, bent down to remove his boots.

'Are you alright?' Tin-Tin observed his movements carefully.

'I'm fine.' He straightened, methodically unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers to the floor. 'I saw what I saw, Tin-Tin. _This_,' he waved a hand towards the bed, 'isn't going to change anything.'

'I'm only doing as your father ordered.'

'I'm fine,' he repeated as he approached the bed.

'Unfortunately your father wants that in writing.' Tin-Tin smiled uncertainly as she patted the crisp white sheet. 'Hop up, please.'

Alan slid silently onto the pallet and lowered his head to the small pillow. 'This is a waste of time,' he said as she began attaching electrodes to his torso. 'We need to start looking for them!'

'Where, Alan?' Tin-Tin placed the final electrode and rested her hand upon his chest, his heart beating steadily beneath her palm. '_Where_ are we going to look?'

Alan lifted his eyes to stare at the ceiling, clenched his jaw tightly as Tin-Tin activated the diagnostic panel and dutifully recorded the readings.

'Everything reads normal,' she said reassuringly.

Alan's eyes continued their inspection of the ceiling as Tin-Tin lifted her fingers to probe carefully through his hair.

'I'm not injured,' he protested as her hands moved across his scalp and down towards his neck.

'You said you fell during some turbulence. Sit up, please.'

'Tin-Tin...' His shoulders tensed as her fingers worked their way slowly down his spine.

'What day is it?' she asked as she inspected the musculature of his back.

'What?' Alan grunted as her fingers dug into a bruise at his hip.

'Today's date. Do you remember?'

'Of course I remember.'

'What is it?' She finished her inspection of his back, tilted him down to the pallet and commenced probing across his chest.

'October twenty-second,' he replied.

'Year?'

'2029.'

She pressed her fingers carefully into his ribs. 'Did you get those bruises on the rescue, or on the way home?'

'On the rescue.' Alan winced as the incessant hands worked their way across his abdomen.

'We're going to need an EEG, I think.' Tin-Tin turned to the trolley beside the bed. 'And I'm going to need some blood.'

He watched as she wrapped a tourniquet around his upper arm.

'Make a fist,' she instructed. 'When was your last birthday?'

'What the hell kind of question is that?'

'Alan, you know what kind of question it is. Make a fist.' She lifted the syringe from its tray. 'When was your last birthday?'

'Tin-Tin.' Alan's hand lashed out as she moved towards him, pinioned her wrist in fingers carved of steel. '_There's nothing wrong with me!_''

* * *

'Please remain seated.'

Virgil fell heavily back into the chair, muscles screaming from his aborted effort to stand. The laboured beating of his heart sent blood rushing through burning veins, a hot tide that seared its way into nerve fibres and pulsed unceasingly beneath the surface of his skin. Sweat pricked in a wave across his shoulders as he lifted his head to appraise the dark-skinned woman who had entered the room, and who was now positioning a data pad on the table in front of him.

'What,' he slurred, tongue thick in his mouth, lips unable to continue the momentum of the sentence.

The woman raised a hand to enforce his silence. 'Pay close attention, Mr Tracy.'

He watched as she seated herself in the chair opposite, noted the close crop of her hair, the tight fit of the jumpsuit that was zippered all the way to her throat. His tongue moved in his mouth as he forged words and sentences and demands for information that one by one failed to materialise into actuality. He blinked, the sharp contrast of this dark woman against the bright white walls of his prison burning holes into his retinas. He wanted desperately to close his eyes. To sleep. To let the heaviness of his body pull him back into oblivion.

'Mr Tracy.'

The words cut through the fog in his skull, a clean slice of sound that shot pain unexpectedly through his temples. He swallowed, the muscles of his throat closing over cut glass.

'On November 26th 2029 your organisation responded to an emergency broadcast from a collapsed mine in Carajás, Brazil.' The woman slid a finger across the data pad, bringing it to sudden life. 'What you did not know when you responded to this call was that a number of the men trapped in this mine were members of a partisan political group…'

'October.' Virgil dredged the word from the dark space at the bottom of his lungs.

. '…one of whom will,' the dark eyes met his as the woman ignored the interruption, 'at the end of 2030 AD, be responsible for the destruction of the civilised world.'

'It's October.' The words lurched drunkenly out of him.

'This man,' the finger tapped the data pad, bringing forth an image of a heavy-set middle-aged man, 'is Hernan Matéo Alvaro.'

'The twenty-second.' Virgil felt as though he were talking underwater.

'From descriptions Alvaro gave to the media at the time, Gordon Tracy and yourself were responsible for extracting him alive from the disaster area.' She pushed the data pad closer to Virgil, aligned it with painful precision against the edge of the table. 'Please memorise his face. It is very important.'

Virgil looked at the face on the data pad, his lips working uselessly, eyes squeezing shut as his body exploded into flame, a wave of pins and needles that pricked their way across the surface of his skin, fingered their way into his scalp and drenched him in sudden sweat. He hunched forward as his stomach twisted into a hard, painful knot, veins tightening in his throat as he retched and vomited only empty air.

The woman studied him with her dark eyes, noted the laboured heave of his chest, focussed intently on the flicker of the pulse at his temple, the hands that trembled where they curled across his abdomen.

She rose, scraped the data pad into one hand and looked down at the top of his bowed head. 'A few more hours, then.'

* * *

'Give it up, son.' Jeff stepped aside as his eldest son swept into _Thunderbird Two's_ cockpit and dropped heavily into the pilot's seat.

Scott's face glistened in the artificial light, his muddied uniform plastered to his body with sweat. He curled his fingers around the steering yoke, gripped it as though he could somehow intuit what had happened through the palms of his hands. He brought up the flight data one more time, eyebrows furrowing in irritation.

'Scott.' Jeff angled forward to lay a hand on his shoulder. He squeezed gently, felt muscles turn to stone beneath his fingers. 'We've downloaded the flight data.' He squeezed harder, tried to break his son's single-minded determination. 'Brains is going through the flight recorder now. Maybe he's found something.'

Scott shrugged his shoulder out from under the firm grip, stabbed angrily at the console as his father's hand fell away. 'They can't have just _disappeared_!'

'But they have.' Jeff leaned forward and disengaged the console beneath Scott's hands, powered _Thunderbird Two_ methodically down until the great beast settled into darkness. 'And now we have to deal with it.'


	3. Part Three

**Part Three**

* * *

'Mr Tracy.'

Virgil blinked as a section of wall slid away and his visitor readmitted herself. This time he did stand.

'It appears you are feeling better.' The data pad slid once more across the table.

Virgil remained planted where he stood, silently scrutinising the woman as she positioned the data screen.

'Please,' she said, nodding towards the seat.

He hesitated for a moment, then sat. He was grateful for the renewed sensation in his limbs, though it still returned in painful fits and starts, jolted him in unexpected bursts.

'I imagine you are expecting an explanation. Who we are. Why we have brought you here.'

Virgil remained silent, fingers curling slowly beneath the table.

The liquid eyes fixed themselves tightly on his own. 'Unfortunately, who we are will have to remain unanswered.'

Virgil's hands hardened into fists.

'Why we have brought you here will be answered soon enough.'

He watched the woman closely as his fingers dug into his palms. 'I would like to know where I am.'

The corner of her mouth twitched. 'It's not a question of _where_ you are.'

Virgil's fingernails broke flesh.

'It is more a question of _when _you are.' She activated the data pad. 'You have been temporally displaced.'

Virgil tensed himself against an imperceptible tremor. 'What?'

'Displaced in Time.'

He shook his head. 'Not possible.'

The woman leant forward to gauge his response. 'It is most definitely possible.'

The fingers of Virgil's hand spasmed. He grimaced as the impulse fired abruptly into his nerve endings, raced through the tight muscles of his arm and exploded across his jaw.

She studied him dispassionately as pain etched its way across his face. 'It's a common side effect.'

'Who _are_ you?' he ground out as the spasm subsided.

'Shall we start at the beginning? Because I have only time to tell you this once.'

* * *

_This wasn't happening._

Scott clamped his teeth together and rolled his chair away from the desk.

He'd gone over _Two's_ telemetry too many times to count, the numbers bleeding into each other on the screen as the results continued to come out the same. Endlessly identical.

There was nothing wrong with the aircraft. Had _been_ nothing wrong with the aircraft. Which left them with their only clue, the only link to the whereabouts of his brothers – _Thunderbird Two's_ in-flight visual. The hard evidence that proved what Alan had been saying. That Virgil and Gordon had simply blinked out of existence.

He glanced across the lab to where Brains hunched over the footage, tracking through the visual stream one millisecond of motion at a time. Scott brought his hands to his face, pressed his palms into the sockets of his eyes, pushed sweet dark relief into the corners of his burning brain.

_This wasn't happening_.

* * *

Virgil rose from his chair, lifted his hands and flexed his fingers experimentally.

'Please remain seated.' The dark eyes followed his movements carefully. 'We are running out of time.'

'Time.' Virgil's hands dropped to his sides. 'Time,' he repeated, eyes hardening. 'Is there 'Time' to return my clothing?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Is that part of the programming? To keep me controlled?' He stepped towards her dangerously. 'Docile?' he spat. '_Humiliated?_'

'Please understand, Mr Tracy. We are not trying to control you. Or humiliate you.' The eyes fixed firmly on his own. 'We are trying to help you. And… trying to enlist your help.'

'I don't believe this.' Virgil felt his self-control dissipate. 'My help?' He slammed the flat of his hand against the table, making the data pad jump and clatter noisily back into place. 'What the fuck kind of game are you _playing_?'

'This is no game.' The liquid eyes lowered. 'Please return to your seat.'

'Not until I get some answers!' He glared at her, body tense, veins cording tight beneath the surface of his skin.

'Don't make me call for assistance,' the woman said quietly.

'Threats?' Virgil's fingers balled into his palms.

'You will be seated, Mr Tracy, whether you like it or not.'

Virgil took a step back as the wall split apart at its invisible seam and a pair jump-suited men moved silently into the room.

The woman rose from her chair and looked him bluntly in the eye. 'We do not have time for this.'

Virgil sized up the men, the crop of their hair, the hard bulk of muscle that tightened beneath their uniforms. He took another step back. 'What is this really about?'

'Time,' the woman stated simply as the men stepped forward and grasped Virgil tightly by the arms, directed him stiffly back to his seat.

Virgil grunted as he was forced down into the chair, two firm pairs of hands pressing hard upon his shoulders, fingers cold as iron digging painfully into the pressure points of his neck. 'What do you want,' he ground out as he tried to twist away from the probing fingers. 'Money?'

The woman returned to her seat and straightened the data pad. 'This man,' she began, 'is Hernan Matéo Alvaro, who will, towards the end of 2030 -'

'_What do you want?_' Virgil flexed his body, tested the strength of the hands that pinned him firmly to the chair.

'You are being given an unprecedented opportunity, Mr Tracy.'

'_Money?_' he repeated, lips tightening as he stared her in the eye.

The woman watched him closely. If she was losing control, Virgil could find no sign of it on the smooth mask of her face.

* * *

Jeff leaned back at his desk and stared through the patio doors, listened to the surf surging beyond the window, watched the pale line of breakers that washed in from the sea. The new moon had set hours ago, and the night was complete.

'Mr Tracy?'

Jeff blinked, his eyes sliding into weary focus. 'I'm sorry Kyrano, I didn't hear you come in.'

Kyrano lowered a tray to the desk and straightened, studied his employer with a practised eye.

'Thank you,' Jeff avoided the penetrating stare, allowed his eyes to follow the scent of coffee to the tray. 'Three cups?'

Kyrano's gaze never wavered. 'Mr Scott and Mr Brains are on their way from the laboratory.'

Jeff nodded to himself. 'The preliminary reports must be ready.'

'Mr Tracy?'

Jeff met the dark eyes.

'Your boys will be safe, Mr Tracy.'

'I'm not so sure, Kyrano.' Jeff shook his head. 'Not this time.'

* * *

Virgil's eyes focussed on the smooth and efficient movement of the woman's lips.

'From the moment your organisation commenced operation, you interfered with the natural order of things. You interrupted the flow of life and death.' The lips stilled as she looked carefully at him. 'Mr Tracy, do you understand what I am telling you?'

Virgil remained silent, chafing beneath the hands that pressed down hard upon his shoulders, the fingers that pressured their way painfully into the back of his neck.

'Thousands of individuals who were fated to die were saved by your organisation's actions. Thousands of individual timelines that should have ended, did not.'

Virgil's lips twisted. 'You're saying we interfere with fate.'

'Every person you saved from death was, in every sense of the word 'fate,' destined to die at that particular moment,' she nodded. 'Every action those people made, every decision, every step in the right or wrong direction, led them to a single specific point in Time. The point where they would die.'

Virgil shook his head dismissively. 'This is ridiculous.'

'You,' she said, 'have interfered with people's lives.'

'We've _saved_ lives!' Virgil's muscles tensed, hands balling into fists.

'Consider,' she said, 'a man you extract from a collapsed building. His life is saved and he is forever grateful. Would you agree?'

'What's your point?'

'Would you also agree that this same man's wife is grateful when she is murdered by her jealous husband only months after he was meant to die?'

Virgil twisted in his seat, tested the hands that pinned him to the chair. 'You're talking hypothetical speculation.'

'Wei Feng.' The woman's eyes hardened. 'Extracted by International Rescue from the rubble of the Funan Hotel after the 2027 Taipei earthquake. He murdered his wife with a carving knife in September of that year.'

Virgil quieted in the chair.

'Katherine Fiorelli,' she continued. 'Marine biologist. Rescued from the sinking _Northern Voyager_ in 2028. Three weeks later her sedan collided with another car. Ms Fiorelli was killed, along with three small children in the other vehicle.' She looked sombrely at him. 'I have other examples, if you would like to hear them.'

'That can't be true.' Virgil felt the blood drain from his face. 'We couldn't have known...'

'We don't expect you to know.'

'Then why are you telling me this? What's the _point_?'

'The point, Mr Tracy, is that every day, people make choices. Not all of them are the right choices, but all of them have consequences. Minutes, days, _years_ later, there will always be consequences.'

'You're asking us to give up?'

She shook her head. 'The altruism of International Rescue saves the good with the bad. Rightly or wrongly you exist, and you have your place in history.'

Virgil blinked uncomprehendingly. 'Then… _what_?'

'We want you to _understand_.'

She leant forward and activated the data pad, brought up the image of a heavy-set middle-aged man. 'This man is Hernan Matéo Alvaro. He will, towards the end of 2030, be responsible for the destruction of the civilised world.' The words spilled from her mouth as though she had rehearsed them a thousand times.

Virgil stared down at the tablet.

'On November 26 2029, when you respond to an emergency at the Ironhorse mine in Carajás, Brazil, _you must not rescue this individual_.'


	4. Part Four

**Part Four**

* * *

Brains silently arranged a series of graphs across Jeff's desk, took a step back and wiped a hand distractedly across his jeans.

'As you can see, Mr Tracy, there is nothing in, ah, these reports to indicate a mal, ah, a malfunction of any kind.'

Scott lifted a coffee cup from the tray and raised it to his lips. He didn't need to see the paperwork to know what it said. He'd run and re-run the diagnostics himself, kept coming up with the same useless results.

'Thank you, Brains.' Jeff lifted a document from the array before him, held it poised between thumb and forefinger. 'Did you have any luck with the in-flight CCTV recordings?'

'N-not yet.' Brains adjusted his glasses. 'They need further, ah, further analysis before we can discount them entirely.'

Jeff nodded and looked at his eldest son. 'Opinion?'

Scott swallowed hard on the coffee. 'My opinion is we don't have a fucking clue.'

'Scott.' Jeff replaced the report dispiritedly on the desk, slid another into his hand. 'Something more helpful, thank you.'

'I don't know what to tell you,' Scott's cup crashed back onto the tray, 'when we've got absolutely nothing to go on.'

'Unacceptable.' Jeff's lips tightened. He turned to Brains. 'Suggestions.'

'I suggest further, ah, further investigation, Mr Tracy.'

'Alright.' Jeff methodically gathered the reports into a neat pile. 'Whatever it takes.' He inhaled deeply and looked hard at Scott. 'Recommendations?'

Scott scratched savagely at the two-day growth that peppered his face. 'Alan has to know something. He's our only witness. He has to know more than he's letting on.'

'Alan's presented his report.' Jeff leafed through the paperwork and extracted a page. 'There's nothing on it – '

'I've read it,' Scott interrupted, 'and there has to be more to it.'

Jeff glanced at the clock. 'I'll talk to him again. First thing in the morning.'

'Talk to him now, Father. We're running out of time.'

'Scott.' Jeff mentally calculated the last time his son had slept, how long he'd been itching under his skin. 'Get some rest.'

Scott's expression was as dark as the night beyond the window. 'Talk to Alan _now_.'

* * *

'Hernan Matéo Alvaro is currently, in 2029, the reigning president of the New Republic of Honduras. You may recall that Honduras, with the backing of Bereznia, seceded from the United Nations Anti-Nuclear Treaty of 2025 and embarked upon a nuclear weapons program that is scheduled to reach fruition in 2030.' She looked hard at Virgil. 'These events are taking place in your present time, are they not?'

Virgil stared at her, chafed beneath the hands that still pressed him to the chair.

'As part of his new nation's weapons program,' she continued, 'Alvaro brokered an agreement with Brazil to purchase high-grade uranium, sourced from the Ironhorse mine in Carajás. It was while Alvaro was inspecting the fruits of his newest acquisitions, on November 26 2029, that the mine unexpectedly collapsed.'

She looked pointedly at him. 'If Alvaro had died in the collapse of the Ironhorse mine, the future of your planet would have transpired quite differently.'

'So we're back to fate.' Virgil blinked at her slowly, a dull pain uncoiling behind his eyes.

'You live in a small world, Mr Tracy, and the powerful and the wealthy move in increasingly tighter circles. A chance encounter between yourself and Alvaro late in 2030 led him to an unexpected impulse, one that would have dire consequences for yourself. And humanity.'

'Consequences,' Virgil repeated reluctantly, as if every question that rolled off his tongue was leading him to some place dark.

'Alvaro never forgot the faces of the men who rescued him. In that chance encounter, all of the cunning and the greed that mark the men of Alvaro's breed established itself instantly.' She leaned across the table towards him. 'Initially, you were to be used as simple trade, the straightforward kidnapping of a billionaire's son. It was sensational news at the time.' She slid a finger across the data pad, scrolled through a series of tabloid headlines.

Virgil's eyes tracked slowly through the images as they flowed across the screen, the stark headlines running into a black and white blur. 'What were his demands?'

'Technology,' she replied simply. 'With his country's weapons program complete, Alvaro required a rapid delivery system. One that his enemies had no hope of countering.'

'No…' Virgil felt the world fall out from beneath him as the puzzle pieces cascaded abruptly into place.

The woman nodded. 'Jeff Tracy gambled with your life when he attempted to push Alvaro to his limit. But the ploy was doomed to failure, and when your father received Alvaro's final message, he broke.'

An invisible noose tightened around Virgil's throat.

'The first target, the first test site of Alvaro's new weapon was, of course, Tracy Island. All life on the island was obliterated at 3:05pm on the twenty-first of December 2030, less than twenty-four hours after delivery of _Thunderbird One_.'

Virgil felt the blood drain from his face.

'Shortly before that first test run, Alvaro released this via global media.' She leaned across the table and reconfigured the data pad, sat back and observed him as he stared at the small screen.

'What is it?' Virgil looked down at the pad.

'It's a message to the world,' she stated simply. 'Written in your blood.'

Virgil's eyes lifted to query hers.

'It's important that you watch it,' she nodded towards the screen. 'It was the last time anybody saw you alive.'

* * *

Jeff pushed his reading glasses higher on his nose as he waited, and re-read the neatly printed incident report he held in his hand. Nothing in the report stood out as unusual, or even unexpected, for a long-haul flight. Everything Alan had written was corroborated by _Thunderbird Two's_ in-flight visual and data recordings. No physical or mechanical anomalies. No sane or logical reason to explain the impossible.

Jeff came to the end of the report, looked up at the door and knocked again. Three short, sharp raps that echoed loudly along the small corridor. He peered at his watch, looked again at the unwelcoming door.

'Alan?' he called out, fingers tightening on the single piece of paper as he listened for sounds of movement behind the door, the tell-tale drag of feet across carpet.

'Come in.' Alan's voice sounded distant through the timber, the electronic lock pinging softly as the door slid smoothly aside.

Jeff slipped his glasses into his breast pocket and glanced around the room, at Alan rifling through his bureau, at the clothes that littered the floor, at the unmade bed. 'I'm sorry, son. Were you sleeping?'

'No, Dad.' Alan shrugged a t-shirt over his head and turned to face his father. 'I was just…lying there.'

'Not like you to – ' Jeff began, stopped as Alan dropped heavily into the chair beside his desk. He looked hard at his son. 'You look tired. Has Brains spoken to you?'

'Yes, I'm tired,' Alan sighed. 'Yes, I've spoken to Brains.' He combed his fingers roughly through his hair. 'Dad, I'm alright. How many times do I have to say it?'

'Until I believe it.' Jeff nodded towards the bench seat at the foot of the bed. 'May I?'

Alan nodded, his expression clouding as his father walked across the room.

Jeff settled onto the edge of the bench. 'I need clarification on a few things.'

Alan's eyes dropped to the report in Jeff's hand. 'There's nothing more I can add.'

'Alan. A single page?' Jeff raised the paper and turned the text towards his youngest son. 'Not even a page. There has to be more than this.'

'Dad, you're talking about something that happened in the space of two minutes.' Alan's cheeks flushed with irritation. 'Less than two minutes. There wasn't _time_ for anything else.'

'So there's nothing more you can add?' Jeff contemplated the smudges of grey that shadowed his son's eyes, the white-hot anger that had abruptly ignited inside him.

'No.' The word was all but dragged from Alan's mouth.

'You don't remember anything else?' Jeff was pushing it.

'I told you already, there _is_ nothing else!'

Jeff lowered his eyes as Alan's rage crashed unimpeded against him. He calmly lifted the report and began to read aloud. _"_G_ordon did not respond to Virgil's hails. I was unable to locate him using my wrist communicator."_' He lowered the page and met the cold glower of his son. 'Gordon was definitely on board when you departed the danger zone?'

'Yes.'

'You saw him?'

'Yes.'

'Did you see him during the flight?'

'No. He was securing equipment in the pod.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes, Dad, I'm sure.'

'When Gordon failed to respond to Virgil's hails, did either of you check the ship's sensors?'

'Jesus Christ.' Alan hunched forward in his chair and dropped his face into the palms of his hands. 'Checking the internal sensors is not standard protocol when somebody doesn't answer on onboard hail.'

'Alan.' Jeff's lips tightened against an internal pressure that was threatening to explode. 'I need to know where your brothers were. How this happened. I need to make sure it doesn't happen again. To _any_ of you.'

Alan lifted his head, fixed his father with a piercing stare. 'You think I was negligent, don't you. That I missed something.' His face hardened. 'You think this is my fault.'

'No.' Jeff stared at his son. 'Of course not. How could this be your fault?'

* * *

The screams were guttural, dragged from a primal place deep within the human body. The agonised sounds of a man grappling with pain and sanity.

'I'm sorry, Mr Tracy.' The woman studied Virgil dispassionately as he watched the tableau play itself out on the small screen in front of him. Her cool eyes observed the blood drain from his face, the sweat that beaded in tiny pearls across his forehead, the moisture that rose swimming in his eyes. She blinked slowly, inured to footage she had seen a multitude of times, her ears deafened to screams that would never really lose their terror.

'Your body was never found,' she added, to complete the misery.

'Please…' Virgil looked away from the screen, struggled ineffectually at the hands that still pressed him to the chair. 'Turn it off.'

The woman silenced the data pad, nodded at the two men as they released their prisoner and stepped away. Virgil hunched forward as the hands fell away from his shoulders, curled his arms tight across his stomach. Darkness swam before his eyes, and he felt bile rise stinging in his throat.

'I'm going to throw up,' he croaked feebly.

'You must not rescue Hernan Matéo Alvaro,' she stated again. 'Allowing him to live leads directly to your own death. To your family's deaths. To the end of International Rescue. And ultimately, to the end of the world.'

'What if I don't do it?' Virgil ground out the question, tried to drown out the sound of the screaming still ringing in his ears. 'What if I _can't_?'

'You are a locus in Time, Mr Tracy. An active participant in the creation of history. The choice will always be yours.' The woman scraped the data pad towards her across the table. 'And your brother's.'

'My brother's?' Virgil looked up, blinked his eyes into focus.

'You and Gordon Tracy have been identified as Alvaro's rescuers. Your brother has been offered the same opportunity that you have.'

'Gordon's here?'

She nodded.

Virgil closed his eyes. He leaned forward, rested his burning forehead against the cool surface of the table. 'I want to see my brother.'

'I'm afraid that won't be possible, Mr Tracy.'


	5. Part Five

**Part Five**

* * *

Scott jolted to surprised attention as an alarm echoed loudly through the villa. It took him two seconds to register what he was hearing as the klaxon emitted a series of electronic pulses that had only been heard during drills. Four more seconds to bring the Base schematics on screen and pinpoint the location of the intrusion.

_Not possible._

Scott barrelled his chair back from the desk and sprinted into the corridor, turned and loped with grim determination towards _Thunderbird Two's_ passenger elevator.

'Scott.'

Scott was dimly aware of a figure at his back, matching him stride for stride.

'Scott!'

Scott slammed a fist onto the elevator panel and turned to survey the corridor behind him. 'Where's Dad?' he barked over the top of Alan's head and the whooping of the klaxon.

'Wait!' Alan grasped his brother's arm, felt corded steel flex beneath his fingertips. His grip loosened. 'You're not going down there.'

The elevator chimed softly as the doors opened wide, a draft of supercooled air sliding out into the corridor. Scott pulled his arm free and glared at his brother, the anger in his eyes silencing any further argument.

* * *

Jeff surveyed the darkened bulk of _Thunderbird Two_ as the intruder alert echoed into silence. 'Lights, Tin-Tin.' He hefted the pistol in his hand and turned to the young man beside him. 'Brains?'

Brains looked up from his scanner. 'Three heat signatures, Mr Tracy. All of them in the, ah, cockpit.'

'One of those will be Scott.' Alan jogged across the hangar as the bank of overhead lights flickered towards full illumination. 'I tried to stop him, Dad.'

Jeff's fingers tightened around the pistol. 'See if you can raise him on your wristcom, Al.'

Alan lifted the communicator dubiously to his mouth. 'Scott? Scott. Respond please.' He eyes locked with his father's as the communicator emitted only dead air. 'Nothing.'

'Alright. We'll treat this as a hostile situation. You all know the drill.' Jeff moved towards _Two's_ forward access hatch. 'Tin-Tin,' he called over his shoulder, 'secure all exit points.'

* * *

Scott inhaled sharply as the passenger elevator slotted neatly into _Thunderbird Two's_ cockpit and the flight deck lights flickered into life. With a pneumatic hiss the guard rail slid mechanically from between his fingers, brought the air rushing from his lungs.

Scott stepped from the elevator, knelt silently beside his brothers where they lay unmoving on the cold metal of the cockpit floor. He studied the motionless forms before him, focussed on the barely perceptible rise and fall of their chests, strained his ears for the sound of breathing. He wiped the sweat from his fingers, reached a hand towards the pulse of Virgil's throat.

'Scott?' Alan's voice burst abruptly from his wristcom, made him jump and jerk his hand out of the air. 'Respond please.'

_Christ_.

Scott's heart hammered in his chest, drowned out the rest of the message as he leant forward and reached once more for Virgil's throat, felt life running warm and thready beneath the skin. He reached across to Gordon, head dropping in relief at the reassuring flood of life that pulsed beneath his fingertips.

* * *

'You look like shit.'

'So do you.' Virgil's voice dragged across a tongue as dry and unyielding as sandpaper. He sipped gratefully at the water Scott pressed to his lips, dropped his head exhausted to the pillow. He looked up, noted the dark shadows around his brother's eyes, the two-day growth that tracked heavily across his chin. Guilt tugged at him and Virgil closed his eyes, swallowed painfully as perspiration prickled cool across his forehead.

'Hey.' Scott reached for a cloth and dabbed it lightly against his brother's face. 'You still with me?'

'Still here,' Virgil murmured. He felt like a dead thing, hollowed out, the core of him replaced with heavy metal. Mercury that pooled dull and grey in his veins.

'How do you feel?'

Virgil's eyes slitted blearily open. 'Like I've been run over by a bus.'

'That good, huh.' Scott placed the cloth carefully on the bedside table and looked up at the overhead monitor. 'Blood pressure's a bit low.' He settled a hand on Virgil's arm, squeezed it reassuringly. Said very quietly, 'You had us worried for a while there. Both of you.'

Memory flashed with strobe-like precision into Virgil's brain, snapshots limned with blinding white light. He found his lips were trembling.

'Gordon woke up a couple of hours ago. Had about the same response as you.' Scott leaned over the bed and looked searchingly into his brother's eyes. 'Virg…do you remember what happened?'

Silence settled across the room as Virgil carefully met Scott's gaze. He was aware of his breathing, loud in his ears, of sweat blooming once more across his skin. Of the clock on the far side of the room ticking slowly, stretching the seconds into hours. _Tick_…

'No.'

The muscles around Scott's mouth contracted, lips narrowing as he carefully searched Virgil's face. He exhaled heavily. 'You don't remember anything?'

'No.' Virgil winced painfully as his throat closed upon air. 'What did Gordon say?'

'Nothing.' Scott slid a hand beneath his brother's head and brought the cup once more to his lips. 'He said he doesn't remember a thing.'

The water filled Virgil's mouth with cool, trickled slowly across his tongue. He held it there, between his teeth, as the heaviness tugged hard again at his limbs. He swallowed. 'I'm tired, Scott.'

Scott lowered Virgil's head back to the pillow and reached for the call button. 'Anything you want to tell me before Dad gets here?'

It was an opportunity to come clean. The kind of veiled ultimatum that Scott had been using on his brothers since he was ten years old.

Virgil's eyes focussed on Scott's thumb as it hovered over the button.

'No.'


	6. Part Six

**Part Six**

* * *

'I'm suspending operations indefinitely.'

'You can't mean that.' Scott stared across the desk at his father.

'I've got no choice.' Jeff lifted a sheaf of papers and tapped them on his desk, placed them neatly in a pile. 'We're two men down, and until we can be sure _Two_ is safe and secure from intrusion, nobody is going anywhere in her.'

'I ran through those reports myself – '

'I know. And I know that neither you nor Brains can find a thing wrong with the aircraft.'

'We haven't tried a test flight yet.' Scott persisted. 'Maybe – '

'Let me make this clear,' Jeff's gaze hardened. 'Nobody is going anywhere in _Thunderbird Two_. At least not yet.' His expression softened. 'I'm bringing John home. He and Brains can hopefully work this out.'

'What about _Thunderbird Five_?'

'We'll divert all calls through the command centre and set up an automated response system.'

'But Dad –'

'Scott.' Jeff lifted a page from the pile and raised it into the air between them. 'This is only temporary. Until we find out what happened and make sure it can't and won't happen again.'

'That could take forever,' Scott countered, looking through the thin page his father held up to the light. A series of graphs shaded through from the opposite side, the comparative EEGs of Gordon and Virgil. Scott's eyes tracked along the peaks and troughs, the hard line indications that, for a moment in time, the universe had spiralled horribly out of control.

'Brains estimates a few days,' Jeff's face betrayed nothing as he placed the page neatly back on the pile. 'At worst a few weeks.'

Scott's eyes followed the paper to the desk. 'Or months,' he stated bluntly.

'Or months,' Jeff conceded. 'However long it takes to make sure you boys are safe.' The grey eyes fixed tightly on his eldest son. 'You haven't slept for nearly three days, Scott. How about you get some rest?'

'I'll bring John home first.' Scott raised a hand to scrub at his face. 'When's the next launch window?'

'Get some sleep, son.' Jeff lifted another page from the pile. 'I'm sending Alan and Tin-Tin.'

'Alan? Dad, I'm not sure…'

'He needs something to do.' Jeff disregarded the negatory shake of Scott's head. 'He's going crazy sitting around waiting.' A smile ghosted briefly across his face. 'Reminds me of somebody.'

* * *

Time.

Virgil fell dreaming through it. Curled his body beneath crisp white sheets as his slumbering mind pushed through the boundaries of reality and returned him to days barely remembered.

Anne-Maree Lundquist, physics major. Older and riper than the rest, she had spoken to the secret heart of Virgil, the hidden place in his soul that shunned the right-angles of the world and wished only to dream.

For a hundred dark nights, Anne-Maree Lundquist opened her mind and her body to him, assured him safe haven in the cocoon of her arms and her legs, clamped her teeth tight against the smooth line of his jaw. With nothing but a slick of sweat between them, she spoke of a world much less straight than his own, a world entirely void of drafting paper and sharp metal shavings. Sometimes, with his head rested in the crook of her neck and his gaze fixed tight on the perfect mound of breast in the line of his sight, she would talk to him about Heisenberg and the dissolution of matter. And later, when he crawled once more into the welcoming hollow of her loins, she whispered into his ear about Faraday and Tesla, discoursed disjointedly on the properties of electricity as the spark of life jumped from his body into her own.

Time, Anne-Maree Lundquist once said as she rode high above him, is not linear. Not a straight line that stretches from end to end. Time is like a pack of playing cards, all the events of the universe piled one atop the other she told him, as she ground down upon him to prove the point. Up. And down. All things happening simultaneously. She paused, leaned forward, placed her hands upon his shoulders and pinned him to the bed.

'Remember,' she said, 'this moment. The two of us. Locked together forever.'

Virgil moved beneath her, tried to urge her back into motion, her breasts poised tantalising inches away from his face.

'One day,' she said, 'you'll be able to reach into that deck of cards and pull this moment out. Replay it. Relive it. It will be like you never left. You'll slip into this skin and find yourself twenty years old again, for ever and for always.' She laughed at him, that crazy wild-eyed laugh of hers that said anything could happen, and crashed hungrily forward to bite at his mouth.

Back in the infirmary bed, with his eyes wide open and his head turned towards the wall, Virgil thought about Anne-Maree Lundquist. About all the moments of his life stacked high one upon the other. The notion that Time was not spread in a straight line across the universe. That Time was simultaneous. All the milestones of his life, supernovaing all at once.

Virgil shuffled through the playing cards, selected and catalogued his first day of school, his mother's death, the final rivet of _Thunderbird Two_, Anne-Maree Lundquist pushed up against the dormitory wall as he pounded his way into her. He raised a hand to his face and studied it, imagined that now, somewhere in that pack of cards, his body was being torn violently apart, with him screaming and pinned to a dirty table.

* * *

The laboratory door clicked quietly open. 'How are they?'

'Sleeping.' Scott glanced from _Thunderbird Two's_ telemetry readouts to the infirmary CCTV feed. 'Looks like whatever hit them, hit them hard.'

John closed the door and leaned against the edge of the desk. 'And nobody's standing guard?'

Scott permitted himself a wry smile. 'We were,' he looked up at his brother, 'but we were politely asked to leave.'

'Getting a bit old for it, I guess,' John's lips quirked.

'I guess.' Scott sobered. 'Hell, John, this is completely out of our league.' He leant back in his chair and tossed his stylus onto the desk. 'Doesn't matter how many times I go over the data, there's just no explaining what happened.'

John nodded towards infirmary feed. 'What did they say?'

'They say they don't remember a thing.' Scott met John's eyes carefully.

'I gather you don't believe that.'

'I don't know what to believe.' The blue eyes never wavered. 'Why wouldn't they tell us?'

John shrugged. 'Why wouldn't you believe them?'

'Don't be a bastard.'

John snorted softly. 'The question remains.'

Scott shook his head and turned away from the intensity of his brother's gaze. 'Father says he's handing the investigation over to you and Brains.'

'That's what he said.' John slid from the desk and leaned in towards the monitor. 'And all we've got are the flight data and cabin recordings?'

'And an EM sweep. We haven't done a structural analysis yet.' Scott retrieved the stylus from the desk. 'That'll be first on your list.'

'Hmm.' John's cool blue eyes tracked the data across the screen. 'Hey.' He prodded a finger into Scott's shoulder and pointed at the infirmary feed, where Gordon could be seen slowly sitting up in his bed. 'I'll go.' He straightened and headed for the door.

'John.' Scott's eyes never left the monitor. 'How's Alan?'

'He's angry.' John paused in the doorway. 'He can't explain what happened and he feels responsible. Couple that with his death-dive in _Two_…' He shook his head.

Scott stared down at the stylus clenched tight between his fingers. 'He's on the edge, I can tell.'

'Yeah. And you avoiding him isn't helping.'

Scott looked up sharply. 'I'm not avoiding him.'

'That's how he feels.'

'Did he say that?'

'I read between the lines.'

'Welcome home, asshole.' Scott turned back to the CCTV to see Gordon experimentally lifting his legs from the bed. 'You'd better go and stop that idiot before he hurts himself.'

* * *

'I've been sent,' John slipped through the infirmary door and closed it softly behind him, 'to make sure you don't hurt yourself.'

'Hey,' Gordon smiled across the room. 'Is it rotation already?"

'Nope. I'm grounded.' John parked himself on the chair beside the small infirmary desk. '_We're_ grounded, I should say.'

'You're kidding.' Gordon's eyebrows furrowed as he struggled into a sitting position. 'Why?'

'_Two's_ out of operation until Dad's certain she's safe.' John leant back in the chair and appraised his brother's movements. 'You really need to lie back down.'

'Is she damaged?' Gordon looked confused.

'To be honest, I don't know. Prelim reports are negative but we need to go over her in more detail. Which is why,' John watched critically as his brother slowly inched himself forward, 'I'm back ahead of schedule.'

'Hopefully you can introduce some sanity into the equation. The way everyone has been behaving...' Gordon swung his legs carefully over the side of the bed. 'Can I ask you something?'

'As long as you lie back down.'

'What have they told you?'

'Not much.' John tapped at his temple with a fingertip. 'Most of it I had to make up.'

'Seriously, John.'

John's hand dropped into his lap. 'Nothing beyond the fact that you and Virgil disappeared _en route_ to Base.' He watched as Gordon laboured over the edge of the bed, noted the dark shadows beneath his eyes, the pallid sheen of his skin**.** 'And that neither of you remember a thing.'

Gordon halted in his progress and looked curiously at his brother across the room. 'How long were we gone?'

John leant forward in the chair. 'You really don't remember anything?'

'How long?' Gordon repeated.

John lifted a clipboard from the desk, frowning as he scanned through Brains' scrawled notes. 'Twenty-eight hours, fifty two minutes, according to this. Why?'

'Everybody's been asking me questions,' Gordon shrugged, 'but nobody's been answering mine.'

John continued scanning the report.

'As if what day it is makes any difference.' Gordon's legs slowly inched towards the floor. 'John?'

John looked up from the clipboard.

'What day is it?'

'October twenty-fifth,' John replied carefully.

Gordon glanced up at the clock.

'What else do you want to know?' John followed Gordon's glance, turned his attention back to Brains' notes. '_Vitals normal_,' he read aloud. '_EEG irregular_.' He raised an eyebrow at his brother. 'No surprises there.'

'Funny.' Gordon's bare feet met the tiled floor.

'_Toxicology negative_,' John continued. '_DNA confirmed_.'

'DNA?' Gordon stood on uncertain legs. 'Does it mention what they were looking for?'

John dropped the clipboard abruptly to the desk. 'C'mon Gordon, get back into bed before they send in the big guns.' He moved across the room and gently coaxed his brother back into a sitting position. 'You and Virgil disappeared into thin air. I guess Dad was worried you might not have been…' he trailed off as he looked at the diagnostic monitor overhead.

'Human?' Gordon grimaced as the muscles in his legs contracted painfully.

'What was that?'

'What?' Gordon exhaled through gritted teeth.

'That,' John said as Gordon grimaced again. 'Are you in pain?'

'No.' Gordon's face paled. 'Yes.'

'I'll call Brains.' John raised a hand towards the call button.

'No.' Gordon's hand clamped around John's arm. 'It's just a muscle spasm. It'll pass.'

'You don't know that.' John's thumb hovered over the button.

'I do.' Gordon's jaw clenched tight around the words. 'I do.'


	7. Part Seven

**Part Seven**

* * *

Virgil sat silently at the dining table. A fixed point in Time. The dead centre of a slowly revolving hurricane.

He stared blankly at the table in front of him, at the white cloth that spread crisp and starched across the worn mahogany, the silverware that ranged neatly to the left and the right. A plate slid into the empty place in front of him, broke the angle of his gaze.

_He wasn't going to make it._

'I don't feel very well,' Virgil said quietly, hands sweating on his thighs. He glanced along the table, at his grandmother's ladle poised in mid-flight. 'I think I might…'

'Virgil.' His grandmother looked wounded. 'Kyrano and I have been cooking all afternoon. And you need to eat,' she added, knowing that guilt alone would keep him there.

He nodded, reached for his water and lifted it to his lips, beads of condensation dripping from the glass and falling cold into his lap.

'Virgil?'

Virgil ignored the faces along the table that swivelled in his direction, turned and met his father's querying expression.

'How do you really feel?'

_He felt like Christ on the cross, crucified on the gaze of a multitude of eyes._

'Okay.' Virgil dropped his gaze back to the plate in front of him. 'I guess.'

'Gordon?' Jeff turned to Gordon, so relieved to have his sons returned he couldn't see that Virgil was dissolving, right before his eyes.

'I feel great, Dad.' Gordon's words crashed like a tidal wave across the table. "Never better.'

_Never better?_ Virgil glanced up, disturbed to find Gordon's cool eyes studying him. Scrutinising him. _Reading his goddamned mind._

'Glad to hear it.' Jeff's voice sounded thin and distant, muffled by the heavy air, drowned out by the sound of Virgil's heart thumping hard against his ribs.

'How's the investigation going?'

Virgil flinched at the sound of Scott's voice, unexpectedly loud beside him. Scott leaned towards his meal as he spoke, elbow brushing casually against his own. Virgil shrank away from the contact, tried to keep the grimace from his face.

_He wasn't going to make it._

'Same,' John replied from the end of the table. 'We're commencing the structural investigation tomorrow. It would really help,' he said to nobody in particular, 'if anyone could remember anything unusual that might have happened prior to or during the incident. Strange noises,' he shrugged, 'or – '

'I've already handed in my report!' Alan slammed his cutlery to the table, the clatter making everyone jump. 'Why don't you ask – '

'Alan,' Jeff said warningly.

Virgil looked up, watched the blood rise in his youngest brother's face as Alan flung an accusing arm towards him. 'Why don't you ask _them_ what they remember?'

'We have,' John interjected calmly.

'Honestly, Al, I don't remember a thing.' Gordon's voice cut through the tension as cleanly as his knife sliced through his steak. 'One minute I was stowing equipment in _Four_, next I was waking up in the infirmary with a splitting headache.'

The lie was told so convincingly that Virgil wondered if it wasn't true. If Gordon really didn't remember a thing.

Gordon raised a heaped fork to his mouth and looked abruptly into Virgil's eyes. 'How about you?' The hazel eyes hardened, the pupils constricting in the light. 'Remember anything?'

Virgil blinked. He looked away from Gordon's gaze and stared down at his dinner, untouched on the plate. 'I don't.' He pushed slowly at his food with a fork. 'No.'

* * *

'What the hell was that all about?'

'What – '

'_That_.' Virgil cut Gordon off before he could begin, cornered him up against the living room wall. 'That little episode in the dining room.'

'That,' Gordon shoved his brother bodily away, 'was about keeping confidences. About making sure you don't come clean.'

'What's that supposed to mean?' Virgil stared hard at Gordon. 'Is that supposed to be a threat?'

Gordon shrugged. 'It can be whatever you want it to be.'

'Jesus, Gordon.' A wave of despair passed across Virgil's face. 'Why are you making this harder than it already is? We have to tell them.'

'Tell them _what_?' Gordon snorted derisively. 'That we travelled through fucking _Time_?'

Virgil's mouth opened, closed again. 'They'll believe us,' he said, unconvinced.

'Then why haven't you told them already?'

'I don't know. I…' Virgil faltered.

'You know exactly why you haven't told them.' Gordon's expression hardened. 'Because if you do, it will make it that much more difficult for us to do what we need to.'

Virgil took a step back. 'You can't be serious.'

Gordon stared him in the eye.

'You can't.' Virgil turned away, paced across the room. '_We_ can't.'

Gordon pushed away from the wall. 'We _have_ to.'

Virgil swung to face him, hissed angrily, '_We can't kill a man!_'

'We have no choice.'

'Are you fucking _insane_?'

'You saw what happened. What's _going_ to happen,' Gordon said. 'They must have shown you.'

Virgil looked at him sharply. 'You saw it?'

'I watched it,' Gordon said softly. He took a small step towards his brother. 'To the end.'

'Oh, God.' Virgil dropped onto the couch. Across the room a clock ticked, hurtled the universe towards oblivion. 'What are we going to do?'

'About what?' Scott's voice sounded unexpectedly from the darkened patio.

'Jesus, Scott.' Gordon turned to the open door. 'Give a guy some warning. You scared the shit out of me.'

'Do about what?' Scott stepped across the threshold and into the light.

'Nothing.' Virgil turned towards Scott, noted the disquiet in the midnight eyes, the pack of cigarettes clamped tight in his brother's hand. He rose. 'I need to…' …_get the hell out of here_, he almost said. Settled instead for leaving the sentence hanging unfinished in the air.


	8. Part Eight

**Part Eight**

* * *

For a man responsible for some of the loudest explosions Jeff Tracy had ever heard, Brains had an unnerving habit of always sneaking up on him. Only this time, Jeff noted as he raised his head from _Thunderbird Two's_ structural reports, he had managed to smuggle in a posse.

'Ah, Mr…Mr Tracy,' Brains began, the words stammering out of his mouth more from excitement than nervousness. Jeff had learned to read the signs over the years, felt his pulse quicken at the prospect that Brains had finally made a breakthrough. He dropped the sheaf of reports to his desk.

'Brains,' he glanced from the scientist to where John and Scott stood beside him. 'Tell me you've found something.'

'Y-yes, Mr Tracy,' Brains replied, shifting on his heels. 'I… I have. And I thought I needed to, to show you. To show, ah, all of you.'

Scott dropped into the nearest chair. 'Then show us.'

'I think you'll all, uh, find this very interesting...I, ah, I...' The scientist trailed off and scratched at his cheek absently.

'Brains,' Jeff prompted.

'Yes?' Brains blinked behind his glasses, jolted out of his train of thought. 'Oh, yes, I think you'll find this very, ah, very interesting. In his report, Alan mentioned turbulence, which did register on the, ah, flight recorder, even though the Base Doppler didn't record any a-atmospheric disturbance that morning.' Brains looked towards Jeff. 'I-I checked.'

'While we were undertaking the structural analysis,' John took up a position at the end of Jeff's desk, 'the flight recorder indicated two instances when _Two's_ superstructure came under strain.'

Brains nodded. 'Those, ah, instances were e-exactly three minutes and ah, twenty-seven seconds apart. I checked those times on the in-flight visual, trying to find a correlation.'

'And you found something?' Jeff asked expectantly.

Brains nodded again. 'On both the cockpit and pod CCTV.'

Jeff leant forward in his chair.

'But nothing registered on the in-flight CCTV recordings,' Scott interjected. 'I checked them myself, a dozen times. More.'

'Correct.' Brains turned towards Scott, the blue eyes behind the glasses bright with excitement. 'Nothing was visible until I, ah, rewrote the software algorithms.'

Scott's mouth set into a thin line. 'Show us,' he challenged.

'The footage is stored on the, ah, on the primary server.'

'Load it to the command console.' Jeff stood and made way for Brains behind the desk. 'I think we need Alan, Virgil and Gordon here for this.'

John's eyes slid from his father to Scott and back again. 'Scott thinks,' John kept his gaze squarely on his father, watched from the corner of his eye as Scott turned in his direction, 'that Virgil and Gordon are lying.'

Silence as that little titbit hurtled its way across the room. Brains paused at the keyboard and raised his head into the vacuum.

Jeff's lips tightened. 'What makes you think that, Scott?' The grey eyes focussed intently on his eldest son.

Scott shot an accusing look at John and shifted in his seat.

'Scott?' Jeff took a step around the desk.

Scott's eyes dropped away from his father's gaze, tracked their way across the fine lines of the stonework of the floor.

'Scott,' Jeff persisted. 'There must be a reason why you think they're lying.'

'He hasn't believed them since the incident,' John cut in, ignoring another blistering glare from his brother.

Jeff sighed, his disappointment evident. 'These are your brothers, Scott. They don't lie.'

Scott faced his father squarely. 'Except that this time I think they are.'

'I need more than 'you think,' son.'

Scott flinched at his father's tone, at the tension evident in the splaying of his father's fingers against the edge of the desk. Brains coughed and returned his attention to the monitor.

'Son.' Jeff's knuckles had turned white.

'I can't explain why. Call it a hunch, call it intuition, call it...' Scott's temper abruptly ignited, propelled him up and out of the chair. 'Call it whatever the hell you want!' He closed his mouth, tamped down hard on his anger. His eyes ranged around the room, lingered on John's querying expression, on Brains, studiously avoiding eye-contact, returned to the steel-hard gaze of his father. 'All I know is there is something they're not telling us.'

'Alright.' Jeff stared at Scott as he considered, not ready to give over completely to a hunch, not yet willing to discount Scott's intuition entirely. 'Bring them in. Let's see if we can get to the bottom of this.'

* * *

Scott hovered on the outside of Virgil's door, centimetres from the timber, a million miles away from the man who was slowly disintegrating on the other side.

He hated this. Hated the changes between them. The avoidance tactics. The dead look in Virgil's eyes whenever he tried to capture his gaze.

Scott raised an arm towards the door, found his hand was trembling.

_Jesus. What the hell was going on?_

He gave the door three short raps. Sharp pinpoints of sound that echoed loudly through the timber. Scott stared at the dark swirling grain of the door. 'Virgil,' he called through the wood. 'It's me.'

A brief pause. The muffled sound of movement. A drawer closing. And then, 'Come in.'

He expected to find Virgil drawing. Reading. Listening to music. Instead he found him standing, pale and crumpled, by the desk. Scott's eyes swept briefly through the room, pausing randomly on the unmade bed, the curtains that billowed at the open window, the laptop ticking quietly on the desk.

'Virgil.' Scott inhaled the stale scent of smoke and sweat that swirled on the eddies in the room.

Virgil's hand slid from the desk to hang loose by his side. 'What.'

Scott's lips tightened at the tone. 'Why won't you tell me what happened?'

'I told you,' Virgil's voice was heavy. 'I don't remember.'

'Doesn't matter how many times you say it, Virg, I don't believe it.' Scott studied him, eyes like laser beams tracking across the surface of his brother's skin. 'What happened out there?'

Virgil's eyes never left the floor. 'I told you I don't remember,' he repeated, a mumbled mantra that did nothing to repel the invasion of his brother's blinding gaze.

'That's bullshit.' Scott's temper flared. 'You do remember. You _both_ do.'

'Scott, I'm tired.'

'Tell me what happened.'

Virgil raised a hand and pressed his fingers to his temple.

Scott took a step forward. 'Tell me.'

Virgil dropped his hand, fingers closing into his palm. 'Just go,' he said quietly. 'Please.'

'Not until you tell me what's going on.'

'Fuck you.' Virgil turned away.

'Goddammit, Virgil.' Scott lashed out like lightning, grabbed hold of his brother's arm, turned him and held him firmly in place. '_What aren't you telling me?_'

'Leave me alone!' Virgil twisted in his brother's grasp, tore himself violently free.

'Virg…' Scott searched his brother's face, tried to find a way over the wall that Virgil had built between them. 'I'm sorry. I'm trying to...' Scott swallowed against the tightness in this throat. He felt helpless, as though the world was closing in around him. 'Why won't you let me help?'

Virgil closed his eyes, shuttered himself against the hurt. 'Please. Just leave me alone.'

Scott turned towards the door, constructed a wall of his own. 'Make yourself presentable,' he said. 'Father wants you in the living room in five minutes.'

* * *

Jeff gestured towards the small couch positioned opposite the desk. 'Take a seat, son.'

Virgil crossed the few steps from the door and seated himself carefully between Gordon and Alan, stiff as bookends at either end of the low couch. He leant back against the leather, immediately regretted the move when sweat plastered his shirt to the upholstery.

'Brains and John have finalised their reports,' Jeff commenced without preamble, 'and they all corroborate Alan's story.'

'About time,' Alan blurted.

'Alan. Please.' Jeff lifted his glasses from his nose. 'Before we begin,' he placed the glasses carefully on the desktop, 'I'd like to ask you all again if you've remembered anything else about the incident.'

_The Incident. An inexplicable occurrence tied to a moment in Time._

Silence from the couch. Alan burned hot where he sat tense beside Virgil. A cooler silence drifted from Gordon, straight-backed at attention.

_Only Time isn't tied down, is it. No longer fixed. No longer predictable._

Alan shifted in his seat. 'No,' he said, definitively.

Virgil glanced sideways towards his youngest brother. 'No,' he concurred.

'Gordon?' Jeff asked.

A short, negatory shake of the head.

Alan leaned forward to glare at his brothers. 'Oh, come on, you must remember _something_.'

Gordon's fingers twitched in his lap.

'There _has_ to be something!' Alan's voice moved higher along the register.

'Alan.' Jeff's tone was low. He was quiet for a moment, and then he sighed and stood**.** 'Perhaps we should look at the footage.'

'Footage?' It was the first word Gordon had said since the meeting had begun.

'Y-yes,' Brains said as Jeff made room for him behind the desk. 'After our initial analysis of the in-flight recordings produced zero findings I, ah, rewrote the software algorithms.' Brains activated the viewscreen and paused while the program loaded. 'That's why it took so long to produce any, ah, results, Mr Tracy,' he said apologetically.

'Never mind, Brains,' Jeff negated the apology with a shake of his head. 'Show us what you've found.'

Brains activated the desktop and turned to face the screen as a high-res magnification of _Thunderbird Two's_ cockpit CCTV recording appeared on the monitor.

'This is 78 minutes into the, ah, the return flight. I've narrowed the field of view to show only the, ah, the immediate area around Virgil, since it was…'

The sentence petered out as Brains stared intently at the screen, at the image of Virgil seated in the pilot's chair, eyes fixed on the horizon. Beyond the still figure of Virgil, the lower half of Alan's body was visible on the passenger seat. On the screen, Virgil's head swivelled in slow motion and turned towards Alan, lips moving silently.

'No sound?' Scott leaned forward in his seat.

Brains inclined his head at the question. 'The modified algorithms have caused too much, ah, sound distortion. They also a-account for the slow visuals.'

Virgil glanced from the display to where Scott leant intently towards the image, the angles of his face limned with flickering light. Virgil returned his gaze to the monitor. To the image of himself, trapped shimmering in Time.

The ghost-image of Virgil spoke silently again, the muscles of his face morphing slowly, as though he had been filmed speaking underwater. As Virgil watched, the ghost-image's expression drifted from placidity to anger.

'This is the moment,' Brains' voice cut through the silence, 'when it was realised that Gordon was not responding to hails.'

Virgil felt his body tense, his lips parting as he stared at the screen.

'W-wait for it….' Brains pointed a finger towards the time count on the screen as it clicked over in one-hundredths of a second.

On the screen the ghost-image of Virgil returned his attention to the cockpit display. Virgil studied his profile on the monitor. The way his eyes slid closed and opened again. The way the sun streamed into the cockpit and highlighted the dark strands of copper in his hair. He felt far removed from the man on the screen. Alien. As though he had never known himself at all.

'W-wait for it…' Brains said again.

On the screen Alan rose from _Thunderbird Two's_ passenger seat, his disembodied legs passing behind the pilot's chair as he moved towards the access passage.

In the corner of his eye Virgil saw his father lean towards the screen, his brother Scott hunching forward intently.

'W-wait for it…' came the warning again as the counter on the screen clicked over another hundredth of a second.

Virgil's lungs sucked hard on the heavy air.

'There!' Brains' shout cut through the room as a brightness unfolded in the centre of the screen and just as suddenly was gone.

Virgil stared at the monitor, at the now-empty chair where his ghost-self had been only split-seconds before.

'What just happened?' Alan scooted himself towards the edge of the couch.

'I don't get it,' said Scott.

John peeled himself away from the wall. 'Play it again.'


	9. Part Nine

**Part Nine**

* * *

He was surrounded by sound. White noise that battered in and around him, drowned out the competing voices of his father and brothers as they jostled verbally against each other for explanation.

_What just happened?_

_Play it back._

_Brains, explain!_

The words slammed into his brain, were swallowed instantly by static, overridden by the staccato of Brains' voice as he attempted to answer each question in turn._ 'Ah… ah… ah…'_

'_What _was_ that?'_

Virgil stared at the screen, at the empty cockpit of _Thunderbird Two_, frozen in Time.

'_Ah…_'

'_What the hell just happened?'_

A hand passed into his field of view, a finger pointed wildly at the monitor.

'_Ah…_'

Virgil's thumb twitched against his thigh as he unconsciously followed the beat.

'_Enough!'_

The deep timbre of his father's voice exploded through the air, hurtled the room into silence as though an invisible bomb had been dropped.

A silence that lasted exactly three seconds.

'What the hell _was_ that?' Scott rounded on Virgil and Gordon.

Virgil blinked, bought his mind into focus, met the questioning gaze of Scott and quickly glanced away.

'As, as I, ah, keep trying to tell you,' Brains fidgeted with the collar of his shirt, 'there is more.'

'Then show us,' Scott demanded.

Brains returned his attention to the keyboard, tapped in a sequence of commands and remained hunched over the desk as the vid feed returned to its starting point.

'Y-you'll see,' he commented as the image of Virgil in _Thunderbird Two's_ cockpit filled the screen once more, 'that the footage has been slowed significantly. I had a, a lot of difficulty a-adjusting the bit-rate and keeping the image, ah, cohesive.' He took a small breath and then added excitedly, 'The time rates we're talking about are un…un_believable!_ This is a technology that is way, w-_way_ beyond us.' He pointed a finger towards the monitor. 'This event is taking place at a sub-atomic level. It's almost as if,' Brains searched his mind for the right words, 'these people are slipping through the spaces in Time.'

Virgil's breath hitched in his lungs.

_Time._

He swallowed, wondered how long it would be before Brains realised how close he had skirted to the truth.

On the monitor, the ghost-image of Virgil spoke again in mute and excruciating slow-motion. Once more, the ghost-Virgil's expression drifted from placidity to anger as the image slowly flickered its way through the same progression of events.

'It was at this point,' Brains reminded, 'that Virgil realised Gordon was not responding to hails.'

On screen, the ghost-Virgil's head swivelled sluggishly, like a man trying to move under a thousand feet of water. Virgil empathised with the stranger on the screen. It felt as though he, too, were struggling under a thousand feet of water. That any moment he might lose the fight and be compressed to a bloodied pulp. He sucked on air as thick and viscous as the ocean, caught it and held it in his lungs, found he had leant forward to stare.

Petals of light unfolded on the screen. A flower that bloomed so bright he had to squint his eyes against it. And when he blinked three figures remained silhouetted in the after-burn, white-suited, dark-skinned, far more than ghosts, far less substantial than reality.

If the Virgil on the screen saw the beings, if he had been blinded momentarily by the flash of bright, white light, he gave no indication. He continued to stare at his flight display, the expression of irritation melting slowly from his face as the three beings leaned in towards him, reached out faster than the eye could follow and laid their hands upon him.

_Those hands…_

Until now, he'd thought of them as phantoms, figments of his imagination that refused to go away. Spectres that haunted his dreams and flickered unrelentingly in the corners of his eyes.

…_oh yes, he remembered those hands. The fingers, pulling at his clothes, pressing against his skin, pinning him to the hard, white chair…_

'Freeze it there, Brains.' Jeff's voice barely registered against the clamour that rose on the inside of Virgil's skull. 'Virgil. Are you sure you don't remember anything? Do you recognise any of the people on the screen?'

Virgil shook his head, met the concerned gaze of his father as every eye in the room turned to query him, studying the muscles in his face as though they could read him like a book.

_No._

Jeff's mouth tightened, doubt rising in the grey eyes.

'Very well.' Jeff's voice betrayed no emotion as he turned back to Brains. 'Show us the Pod recordings.'

'Y-yes, Mr Tracy. The Pod recordings are from, ah, three minutes and twenty-seven seconds prior to the cockpit event, and, ah, coincide with _Thunderbird Two's_ first incident of structural i-instability.' The vid blacked out momentarily as Brains cleared his throat. 'This image shows the, ah, rear right quadrant of the pod.'

The blank screen was replaced with a wide-angle view of the pod interior, in the centre of which Gordon could be seen stowing equipment in a locker. His back was to the camera, his movement slowed down to thousandths of a second. Virgil watched unblinking as the on-screen Gordon raised an arm in tortuous slow-motion and millisecond by millisecond slammed the locker door closed.

'Wait for it,' Brains commenced his countdown again, was cut short by the bloom of light in the pod, the three figures revealed in the fading glow, the hands reaching for Gordon faster than the eye could see. Then Gordon, too, was gone.

Once more the faces in the room turned as one as Jeff eyed Gordon questioningly.

'Gordon? Do you remember anything? Anything at all that might help us get to the bottom of this?'

Gordon shrugged, the movement slight as he shook his head. If he hesitated at all before the words fell from his lips, there was no sign of it in the unwavering response. 'I don't know what to tell you, Dad. I don't remember a thing.'

Virgil glanced sideways, caught the smooth planes of Gordon's profile in the corner of his eye.

_How easy it had become for him to lie._

'Well, whoever, or whatever, they are,' John turned to face his father, 'it seems they knew exactly what they were doing.'

'_Exactly_ what they were doing,' Brains echoed. 'They, ah, targeted Gordon and Virgil precisely and effected the, ah, extraction while _Thunderbird Two_ was mid-flight and traveling at eight hundred kilometres per hour, two, ah, two thousand feet above the ocean. The implications of technology like that…' he trailed off as the implications loomed large in his mind.

'But how could they target anybody so precisely?' Scott's frustration was evident. 'Unless they had been inside _Two_ before… it's impossible.' He exhaled heavily. 'There's no point even speculating.'

'At this point all we _have_ is speculation,' John said. 'But the salient point is that _Thunderbird Two_ is functional. There's no reason – '

'_Thunderbird Two_ is remaining grounded,' Jeff cut in, anticipating the end of John's statement.

'But Mr, Mr Tracy,' Brains gestured towards the screen. 'We've seen this, ah, incident, is not connected to anything structural or, ah, mechanical.'

Jeff remained unmoved. 'I understand, Brains, but we need to be sure we can prevent this happening again.'

'Father,' John persisted, 'whatever this is, whatever it _was_, if the technology is as advanced as Brains says it is, it's clear there's nothing we can do to prevent it happening again.'

'That's true, Mr Tracy,' Brains agreed. 'If these people are operating on a sub-atomic level, a-as I, ah, suspect, there is no shielding I, or, ah, anybody, could design to prevent this happening again. I-if,' he added reservedly, 'if it ever happens again.'

Jeff nodded minutely. 'So you're saying you don't see any reason to ground operations.'

'Ah…' Brains stared at the desk as the ramifications of the question hit home. If he wasn't one hundred per cent sure… 'W-what I'm saying is, what I'm saying…' He glanced sideways to find Scott studying him intently.

'What you implied,' Scott pushed the point, 'is that it's your professional opinion that there is no reason to ground operations.'

'Ah.' Brains pushed his glasses higher onto his nose, met the hard blue stare of International Rescue's Field Commander. 'Y-yes, Scott, I guess that's what I'm saying.'

'Alright,' Jeff conceded. 'Brains, we'll accept your professional opinion. But I want to give it another week. Just to be sure.'

'But Father!' Alan interjected. 'What if it happens again? What if next time – '

Jeff locked eyes with his youngest son.. _'_Alan, since you've received a clean bill of health, I want you in _Thunderbird Five_ by the end of the week when we resume operations.'

'But Dad!' Alan rose abruptly from his seat.

'Al,' Gordon said softly.

'No, Gordon,' Alan turned on his brother, the palpable force of his anger washing over the room, over Virgil, caught in the middle. 'I'm sick of this! It wasn't you who nearly – '

'Alan.' Scott took a warning step forward.

'What?' Alan turned to glare at Scott. '_What?_'

'Enough!' Jeff's temper was rising. 'This isn't open for discussion.' His eyes locked with his youngest son's. 'Do you understand?'

An uneasy silence settled over the room.

'Alan?' Jeff's voice lowered. 'Do you understand?'

* * *

Alan never really needed a reason for a fast escape. In fact, Scott considered as he bolted from the lounge in his youngest brother's wake, it was a feat of some self-control that Alan had lasted as long as he had. Seven seconds, counted in one-one-thousands in his head, as he had waited for his brother to explode.

'Alan!' Scott called in the direction Alan had taken, muttered an annoyed expletive under his breath as he turned and took off along the corridor after him. 'Wait!'

Alan came to an abrupt halt in the passageway, let the ramrod turn of his back spell out his feelings plainly. A drift of cold hard anger that stopped Scott in his tracks. 'What?' Alan said without turning. A single word filled with all the pith he could muster.

'Al.' Scott said to his brother's back. 'What do you want me to say? This isn't about you. This is about them, and at least on _Five_ you'll be out of it. You'll be safe.

'But it _is_ about me.' Alan turned to face him. 'It's about _all_ of us. And I won't be safe. None of us will be safe. Not in the face of technology like that.'

'Al.' Scott closed the distance between them, raised a hand to his brother's shoulder and pulled him close enough to see moisture rise in the blue eyes. 'You'll be safe. I promise you'll be safe.'

'You don't get it.' Alan shook his head, the angle of his shoulder shifting beneath Scott's fingers. '_None_ of you get it._ Thunderbird Two_ nearly took out the villa, and everybody in it, Scott. _Everybody_.' His voice broke, reduced his words to a plaintive whisper. '_With me at the helm._'

Scott searched Alan's face, saw in it the fear and the terror and the total loss of control. His hand moved to the back of his brother's neck and squeezed reassuringly, as though the familiar feel of flesh against flesh might somehow make them proof against the unknown.

'I'm sorry,' Scott said at last. 'I'm sorry.' He leaned in and rested his forehead against Alan's, felt the slick of his brother's fear cool against his skin. 'We'll get through this. We always do.'


	10. Part Ten

**Part Ten**

* * *

Virgil dropped heavily to the sand, turned his back to the ocean and the late-rising moon and stared unseeing into the dark night of the forest. 'I can't do this anymore.'

There was a moment of silence that the sea rushed to fill, and then Gordon opened his mouth, pushed words into the heavy air between them. 'Brains told me that Time is circular. That if you could go fast enough – '

'You told Brains?'

Gordon squatted down opposite him, plunged a hand into the sand and let the soft powder slide in rivulets through his fingers. 'It came up one day.'

'Time travel is hardly the stuff of daily conversation.' Virgil blinked in the dark, surprised at the venom in his own voice.

Gordon wiped his hand on his shorts and settled himself back against a tree. Waves pushed gently at the shore, slid softly across the cooling sand. Beyond the reef the surf pounded dully, distant, muted by the heat-laden air pressing down from above.

Virgil watched the dark shape beneath the tree, the soft glimmer of Gordon's eyes as they stared intently towards the horizon. 'Tell me,' he said as the yellow moon pulled hard at his back.

'Space,' said Gordon, motionless beneath the whispering palm, 'is curved.' He seemed unaffected by the forces working on and around him, a calm and dark oasis at the centre of a maelstrom. 'It's bent around gravity,' he continued, 'and Brains says there's enough mass out there to bend the universe right around on itself.' He raised a hand into the air and spiralled it in a lazy arc. 'And if Space is curved on itself, then Time is, too.'

'Meaning it's circular as opposed to linear.'

'Right.' Gordon nodded in the dark. 'Which means everything is relative to where you are on the curve of the Space-Time Continuum.'

'Listen to yourself.' Virgil reached for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and tapped one out of the package. '_Space-Time Continuum_,' he repeated, shielding his face from the breeze as he struck the flint of his lighter.

Gordon shifted against the tree. 'When are you gonna give that shit up?'

Virgil slid the lighter into his pocket, inhaled deeply. 'Time travel can't be real. It's not possible.'

'Time travel is possible, Virg.' The answer was firm, loaded with conviction.

'It can't be.' The cigarette glowed brightly as Virgil inhaled. 'Something else must have happened. Mind Control. Drugs.' He cast about in the dark for alternatives. 'I don't know. Hypnosis.'

'Think about it. If Space-Time is a sphere, then to get to the future all you need to do is fly in the same direction that the universe is rotating.'

Virgil snorted. 'And to get back you fly in the other direction?'

'Right.' Gordon ignored the scepticism in his brother's voice.

'_You_ think about it, Gordon. If Time is circular, then everything that can happen has _already_ happened.' Virgil exhaled a soft cloud of smoke. 'Which means the future must be as fixed as the past.'

'No.' Gordon shifted against the tree and stretched his legs out on the sand. 'It's exactly the opposite. Nothing is fixed, and the past is as changeable as the future.'

Virgil turned away from the silhouette of his brother, watched the moon rise in the corner of his eye. 'Why us,' he said, into the dark.

'I asked her why,' Gordon replied. 'She said we were – '

'Don't,' Virgil said, already knowing. Hearing the woman's words ringing clear in his head as she reduced him to an abstract. To a single point in Time and Space.

He remembered other things, too. The way the chair felt, cold upon the small of his back. The sterile smell of filtered air and plastic. The woman's profile, dark against the light. And her words, cool and calm and filled with vague hope and the gentle threat of terror.

'There are individuals who warp Time,' she had told him in a voice as brittle as splintering glass. 'They wrap it around themselves like eddies in a current. But like pebbles in a stream, they are always swallowed up. Destroyed by the roles they play in the great routs of humanity.'

The dark eyes studied him closely, lips quirking into something that might have been amusement, might have been disappointment. 'You stand at a crossroads, Mr Tracy.' She slid the datapad away from him, caressed it absently with a finger. 'You merely have to choose the path.'

He shook his head. 'By allowing a man to die.'

'We are giving you the opportunity to change your own future. Hoped that by offering you the choice between living and dying, then your motivation might be stronger.' She seemed weary, suddenly, and older than she looked. As though the tight planes of her smooth face concealed a being more ancient than the universe itself.

'You are asking me to choose,' he had said, 'between my life and my integrity.'

'For most people it isn't a choice.'

'Most people,' he repeated as a tremor rose inside him.

'You still don't understand.' She shook her head. 'You never understand.'

'What the hell does that mean?' The tremor reached his hands and he lifted them to the table, spread his fingers along the cool white plastic to stop them from shaking.

'This is our third attempt to convince you, Mr Tracy.'

Virgil's fingers stilled on the table, sinews pulling hard against the bone.

'What,' he stared at his hands as the world spun out from beneath him, 'are you saying?'

'This is the third time we have brought you here. The third time we have given you this opportunity.' She watched him closely, her voice tainted with pity and resignation. 'And your response is always the same.'

'But I don't…' He cast about in the shadowless room for answers. 'I've never ... never...' The words trailed off as he stared up at the smooth face. Watched as death and destruction rose in the dark orbs of her eyes.

Virgil pushed the cigarette into the sand and looked up at the sky overhead. 'I can't kill a man, Gordon.'

Gordon disappeared into darkness as a cloud obscured the rising moon. 'I can.'

Virgil opened his mouth, tasted salt on the wind. 'What happened, Gordon? What did they do to you?'

'Ah...' Gordon shrugged in the night, leaned back and looked up at the sky, as though he were searching for the answer in the broken clouds that scudded overhead. 'They motivated me,' he finally said, softly.

'Motivated you?' Virgil repeated as the clouds parted and the moon painted them both in silver.

'It wasn't that difficult.' Gordon turned away from the sky, glanced at the sea, at the sand, at the moonlit ghost of his brother. 'They offered me the opportunity to save my family.' The dark eyes fixed intently on him. 'To save _you_.'

Virgil clenched his hands in the sand, balled them into gritty fists and bowed his head. 'I don't want to die, Gordon. Not like that.'

He closed his eyes, felt the island move and breathe around him, felt his blood pulse to the inhale and exhale of the tide as the ocean pulled at the fabric of reality, wearing it away one atom at a time.

Virgil felt the dissolution keenly, felt his skin prick as the universe sought to tear him apart.

* * *

Scott stepped into the tiny office and closed the door softly behind him. 'I need your help.'

John leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow.

'How about it?' Scott prompted, when his brother didn't say a word.

'How about what?' John toyed with the pen between his fingers. 'You haven't told me what, exactly, you want.'

Scott looked away from John's clear gaze and sucked a lungful of air noisily past his teeth. He shook his head.

'What?' John dropped the pen to the desk and leaned forward to look closely at his brother.

'I need…' Scott continued to avoid John's gaze. 'I need access to Virgil's server account.'

Silence filled the small room.

'Will you help me?' Scott met his brother's eyes.

'Scott…'

Scott studied his brother expectantly.

'…I can't,' John said.

'You mean you won't.'

'No. I won't.'

'Jesus, John.'

'Don't give me that. What the hell's the matter with you?'

Scott's jaw tightened.

'You're obsessing,' John continued. 'Leave him alone.'

'I can't.' Scott's face remained tight. 'Something's wrong.'

'Something's wrong with Gordon, too, but you don't seem to have noticed that.'

Scott flinched. _Of course he'd noticed. Fleeting glimpses whenever Gordon's carefully schooled façade had cracked, the merest hint of terror bleeding through. _'Gordon?' he said aloud, stupidly.

'Yes. Gordon,' John repeated. 'He's quiet. Withdrawn.' A look of disquiet passed across John's face. 'Have you ever seen him look so tired?'

Scott's head shook, a gentle tremor as he considered his brother's words.

John turned away and leaned back towards the desk.

'So you won't help me.'

'Christ, Scott. Just leave it alone.'

'There are other ways.'

'Fine.' John returned to his analysis. 'Find another way.'

* * *

Virgil stared at the piano, hands resting heavy on his thighs, the keyboard stretching away beyond the far edges of his peripheral vision. The instrument seemed dangerous somehow, the keys grimacing like faded yellow teeth that might bite at him and tear his flesh to shreds. Virgil straightened on the stool, a surge of dread crawling along his spine and forming a hard, tight knot at the base of his skull.

He positioned his fingers lightly on the keyboard, glanced across the room at his father, removed his hands from the keys and returned them to his lap.

'Father?'

'Yes, son?' Jeff raised his head from his paperwork, slid the reading glasses from his nose.

'What day is it?'

'Today?' Jeff's eyes darkened briefly. 'The fifteenth.'

'November, right?'

Jeff nodded, eyebrows furrowing.

Virgil looked back at the keyboard, keenly aware of his father studying him from across the room. He adjusted his music, reached across the piano and started the metronome, rested his fingers once more on the grimacing keys.

_Tick_…

Virgil lifted his eyes to the metronome as the pendulum swung wide upon its case. He swallowed, stared down at the worn keys, at hands baked hard by the sun and the passage of time.

Time.

…_tick…_

Jeff returned to his paperwork, oblivious to his son's heart lurching in three-quarter time.

…_tick…_

Sweat blossomed in Virgil's armpits as his heart skipped a beat. He pressed his fingers to the keys. His hands, stiff, unwieldy, perversely unwilling, produced a discordant crash as the pendulum swung mockingly into his field of view.

…_tick… _

Time, marking Time_… Time breathing down his fucking neck!_

Virgil reached out and grasped the metronome violently, sent it hurtling across the room.

* * *

_He was a total asshole. _

Scott hunkered over the computer screen in semi-darkness, glanced for the umpteenth time at the door to make sure it was locked.

_He had to be._

Scott tapped the screen, brought up Virgil's downloads for the past three months.

_Why else would he be here…_

He positioned the pen in his hand, poised it over a clean piece of paper.

…_lurking in the dark…_

The screen ticked over momentarily, flared to life as a list of Virgil's searches displayed in high contrast on the monitor.

…_accessing his brother's search history?_

Scott scanned the list, mentally scratched out the irrelevant, hastily scribbled down a series of dates and times and keywords. He picked through the sheets of notepaper on the desk, carefully organised them into correlations.

Here…October 26, the day after Virgil was released from the infirmary… Hernan Matéo Alvaro. Biography, recent history, affiliations, political aspirations. And here, October 30, November 3, November 10, Alvaro again.

He shuffled through the papers, lined them neatly along the edge of the desk.

October 30, New Republic of Honduras. Bereznia, United Nations Anti-Nuclear Treaty. Honduran nuclear weapons program.

Scott leant back in the chair and stared at the computer screen. Rearranged the papers one more time.

October 26, 27, Ironhorse mine, Carajás, Brazil. Location. Schematics.

And here, November 1, the theoretics of Time Travel.

Scott scrubbed wearily at his face. _Don't tell me Virgil swallowed Brains' Time Travel shit._

He turned his attention back to the computer screen. Tried to find the pattern hidden within his brother's mind. Jolted violently as a crash sounded from the living room and echoed down the hall.

_Christ!_

Scott hastily shut down the computer, scraped the papers into his hand and exited the room.


	11. Part Eleven

**Part Eleven**

* * *

'I heard that was some performance this afternoon.'

'Father sent you.'

'Kind of not really.' John settled into the lounger beside Virgil's and stretched his legs out along the patterned cushion, turned his eyes toward the pool that rippled blue and cool beyond his bare feet. 'Dad sent Scott, Scott sent me.'

Virgil snorted derisively.

'Buy you a drink?' John proffered a tumbler towards his brother, said soberly, 'We're worried about you.'

'Don't be.' Virgil raised a hand for the tumbler, downed half the contents in one hard swallow. He rested the glass on his thigh, closed his eyes as the bourbon tracked a warm flame down his throat. 'I'm fine.'

'Are you?'

Virgil's eyes remained tightly closed. 'Please John, don't start.'

'Sure.' John leaned back against the cushion, watched as the sun fell in slow motion towards the sea.

'John?' Virgil raised the glass to his lips as the sun disappeared beyond the dark edge of the Earth. 'Do you believe in fate?'

'As in,' John looked towards his brother, 'universal predestiny?'

Virgil drained the last of the bourbon. 'Something like that.'

'I guess.' John turned back to the horizon as evening settled cool over the island. 'Sometimes.'

'I've been thinking about it,' Virgil turned the empty tumbler in his hand. 'Lately.'

John studied the space where the sun had been.

'What are we doing here, John?'

'Here?' John turned his head.

'Here.' Virgil met his brother's gaze. 'This.' He raised his free hand into the air, encompassed the whole of the universe in one single sweep. 'What are we doing?'

John's eyebrows furrowed in the dimming light. 'Do you mean 'here' in an existential 'why are we here' kind of way?'

'Yes. No.' Virgil's frustration bled through his voice. 'I mean _here_. The rescue business. What are we doing?'

'I'm not sure I understand,' John said carefully.

'Who are _we_ to decide who lives or dies?'

'We don't decide.' John shrugged in the twilight. 'We rescue who we can. Save who we can.'

'You're wrong.' Virgil's face was lost in shadow. 'We make _all_ the decisions. We decide whether we answer a call or not. Who we take away from death. Who we leave behind.'

'Where's this coming from?' John asked quietly as the patio lights flickered to life and bathed them both in yellow.

Virgil's grip tightened on the tumbler, fingers white, as though the bone were showing through. 'Have we set ourselves up as gods?'

John's eyes fell towards the glass. 'Virg…'

Virgil raised the glass to the light, squeezed hard on the sharp angles of the decorative crystal.

'Virgil.' John sat forward.

Virgil looked at his brother over the rim of the empty tumbler. 'We're not gods, John.' The glass snapped abruptly in his hand, splinters of crystal shattering onto the pavement as blood fountained from his fingertips.

'Jesus Virg, what's wrong with you?' John leapt from the chair and ripped his t-shirt over his head.

'Not gods.' Virgil watched, mesmerised, as blood oozed warm from the breaches in his skin.

'I get it,' John replied tersely as he crouched beside him and wrapped the shirt around the mess of Virgil's hand, squeezed tight to staunch the flow of blood. He stared hard into his brother's eyes. 'What the hell is going on?'

'John.' Virgil looked down at John's fingers, pressed hard around the bloodied shirt. 'There's something I need to…_' _He jumped in his brother's grip, winced, as the emergency klaxon echoed loudly across the island.

John glanced up at the lighted windows of the villa. 'Christ.'

* * *

'…approach from here.' Jeff pointed towards an aerial photograph of the Nepalese border, pausing as John and Virgil joined the briefing session. 'Good, you're…' Jeff's eyes narrowed at the bloodied shirt twisted around Virgil's fist. 'What happened?'

All eyes turned toward Virgil.

'Broken glass.' John steered Virgil towards a chair.

'It's nothing.' Virgil dropped into the seat, cradled his hand in his lap.

'It's going to need stitches.' John looked sideways to where Scott stood by the desk with folded arms, appraising Virgil critically. He watched as Scott opened his mouth to speak, silenced him with a quick shake of his head.

'You'd better alert Brains and get down to the infirmary.' Jeff looked at Virgil's face, lowered his gaze to the mess of blood and shirt. 'Scott and John can handle this in _Thunderbird One_.'

Virgil's head dropped to avoid the grey eyes, stared down at the throbbing mess of his hand, hot and sticky in his lap.

* * *

'It was crazy.' John didn't look up from the manifest that rested on his knees. 'Do you think 500 metres of rope will be enough?'

Scott adjusted _Thunderbird One's_ trajectory. 'Base camp estimate the crevasse is 400 at its deepest. I can lower you down if you don't want to rappel.'

'No thanks.' John moved to the next item on the list. 'Between the wind speed and the VTOL, I'd have a better chance of riding out a tornado in an oven.'

'You say he purposely broke the glass?'

'With one hand.' John peered over the top of the list at the equipment piled on the floor in front of him. 'I've seen some crazy shit in my time, but this was right out there.'

'I just don't understand what's going on inside his head.'

'Like I said, crazy shit.' John pulled a pack onto his lap, began sorting through descenders and carabiner clips. 'One minute he's questioning our place in the universe, next thing there's glass and blood all over the place.'

'Our place in the universe?'

'More specifically, the rescue business. Why we do what we do.'

Scott looked down to where his brother sat on the jump seat. 'Do you think he wants out?'

'Who the hell would know.' John dropped the pack to the cockpit floor. 'He also took pains to point out that we're not gods.'

'What?' Scott stared down at the top of John's blond head.

'Just what I said.' John looked up and met his brother's eyes. 'We're not gods.'


End file.
